


Billable Hours

by lonelywalker



Category: Close to Home
Genre: Age Difference, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-19
Updated: 2011-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:19:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone has to pay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Billable Hours

He's not her father.

He lives in an apartment lined with books, with lights dimmed a shade too much. She wants to reprimand him for straining his eyes, but she knows she does the same. There's something comforting about a dull, orange light, about the moist smell and well-worn smell of old volumes.

Her thumb trails down a stack of uncut pages, the uneven ridges like Braille against her skin, unreadable, unknowable.

She can't think of anything worth saying beyond easy pleasantries.

He has a hole in his shoulder, clean and round, a work of precision. She can imagine even stitches underneath the gauze, underneath the shirt that hangs from his shoulders (she'd caught him at a bad time). She can imagine sliding a finger right through him, as if he weren't there at all.

She can imagine his blood on her hands.

They drink red wine his girlfriend had saved for cooking, and it's only after the second glass that she thinks of the pain pills they must have given him. But that's the least of it, after all.

There are no photographs on his walls. No children. An ex-wife. Maybe she'll see photographs of his girl in his wallet one day. Maybe not.

They sit on the couch and discuss the case. Annabeth is almost certain that this entire evening is one of his "gray areas".

But he's not her father.

 

Lunch is repetitive, and she has learned to like routine in the last few months. Low-fat turkey. A dash of mustard. Wholegrain bread. He brings sodas that she suspects aren't half as healthy as he claims.

She could become addicted to park benches in the spring.

It has been six months since Jack died. Too long. Not long enough. But she's learned not to flinch when he puts his arm around her, when he hugs her in greeting. His shoulder still aches, but he's trying. She's trying, too.

She has never been to his office. He tells her the air conditioning is always broken, that his partner can't hold a phone conversation without shouting, that he enjoys the walk.

"You just like tormenting the prosecutor's office," she tells him, and he doesn't object. But the park isn't her turf. It isn't his, even if he always edges the conversation onto a current case sooner or later.

Billable hours. She knows that every conversation they have, about the weather, about Haley, about the college football season, will be jotted down in his careful handwriting, blocked into hours of heated legal discussion about his clients' legal futures.

It's all off the record. They have plausible deniability. None of it has ever happened.

One day she knows it will.

 

He's not her father.

She cries in his arms the day Maureen dies, tears for Jack lying in the morgue, for Doug shot on the courthouse steps, for Kelly Joffe dead on the operating table.

He is warm, and solid, and steady, his wounds healed into scars. There are bars around them, orange jumpsuits not far away. Somewhere out of sight is a prison guard listening to her sniffle, looking at his watch.

His girlfriend travels. She's gone most of the time. One weekend in two, Doug will rent movies and take the phone off the hook. It's not love, but it's okay, he's told her. It's as serious as he's likely to get at his age, with his workload, with his _charming_ personality. Annabeth still hasn't met her.

She can hear the clink of keys.

"It's okay, honey," Doug says, his voice a whisper by her ear, and she holds him tighter, clinging to him for support, hoping that he might break, too. "It's okay."

She wishes, some nights, that he were still married, still laughingly happy with a band of gold on his finger. That would make it harder. Would make it easier when she kisses him with tears on her lips.

He's not her father, and he doesn't break.

 

At night, there are casebooks spreadeagled on her bedroom floor, and wine-stained glasses by her bed. It is a year since Jack died, and she can only grapple for meaning in the occasion. It's impossible to know what to think.

She wishes, vaguely, that it had been Matt on this night of nights. She could tolerate hating him. She can't cope with losing Doug.

He moves easily against her, and she can sense him smiling, the covers pulled around them like barricades. It's almost midnight, and she's warned him not to wake Haley. His breath against her cheek feels irresponsibly loud.

" _Doug_ ," she says, fingertips dug into the ridged scar left by the exit wound. She wants him to beg, to breathe her name as his knee parts her thighs and he pushes inside her. "It's been a year."

Maybe he understands it as a warning. She hasn't told him about Matt. But she wants this to be slow, regardless. She wants it to be forever.

His are long, studied strokes, his hands planted palms-down underneath her shoulders. She can feel the tension in his arms. Her fingernails scrape down his biceps, and he pushes his head against her neck, his hair damp, his kisses with a hint of desperation.

She's so slick she can feel it, her body willing and open and ready for him. He takes her whole, the very moment before she thinks of asking him to wait.

They lie together in long shadows, and she stares at the ceiling, avoiding the photos by her bed. She hopes that his eyes are closed.

Her attention turns to the disarray on her floor: upturned books that tiny feet might trip over in the morning, pens stuck between pages that will dry out in this summer air. She thinks of turkey sandwiches in the park, of too-neat handwriting, of tax returns and long-disputed legal opinions.

"You know, you could almost try a constitutional argument..." But his fingers are on her lips.

"This one's pro bono," he tells her in a whisper, gathering her up in his arms, her cheek pressed tight against his shoulder.

Next to them, alongside forgotten photographs and discarded wine glasses, her bedside clock starts to mark the minutes of a new day.


End file.
